I played FFXI about 5 years ago, and loved the **** out of it. I had stopped, and started it up recently, only to find all my friends were gone, and the servers were practically empty compared to where they were, also there were no low level peeps, so leveling up a new character is not as fun anymore... So, here i am asking, is this game a good replacement, or should i just let the dream die? I am currently downloading the benchmark or w/e to see what that has to show me, but i wanted some first hand experience from players who have already fully experienced the game. Thanks for any replies and advice you have to offer :)

Just FYI, there are still many people who play FFXI, and a ton of people now make their home in Jeuno.

You no longer need a party to level up to lvl 20 very quickly. In other words, you may feel alone when you first start out, but in no time at all you'll be around scores of other players again.

If it's a higher population of gamers you need, then I'd definitely stick with FFXI at this point... not only is FFXIV's playerbase smaller (or at least it seems much smaller, especially with NA and EU gamers), but the lack of linkshell management and party search features in FFXIV make interacting with others unnecessarily difficult.

I played FFXI about 5 years ago, and loved the **** out of it. I had stopped, and started it up recently, only to find all my friends were gone, and the servers were practically empty compared to where they were, also there were no low level peeps, so leveling up a new character is not as fun anymore...

All XI servers have large playerbases still, there are just none in the starter cities and all low level alliances take place in different places to where they used to. Gusgen mines (14+), crawlers nest (30+) etc are the big leveling areas now.

Currently over nearly 2.5k people on my server on FFXI (and they are all around that during peak time). FFXIV servers have a tiny fraction of as many players, it's as dead as any MMO can get.

FFXIV is honestly nothing like XI at all anyway, enjoying FFXI will give you no indication of whether you will like XIV anymore than Aion. I'm a pretty hardcore XI player and I find very little enjoyable about XIV right now. Only thing they share in honesty is the name and a few designs copied over, nothing else is the same.